Person Place Thing is an interview show hosted by Randy Cohen based on the idea that people are particularly engaging when they speak, not directly about themselves, but about something they care about. This episode will feature a conversation with Dr. Timon McPhearson, associate professor of urban ecology and director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School. As an urban ecologist and climate scientist, Dr. McPhearson will discuss the role environmental justice and equity can play in imagining more sustainable and resilient cities in the face of our current climate crisis. As cities like New York face unprecedented infrastructure and technological challenges, how will the most vulnerable communities be impacted by extreme weather events, rising temperatures, and increased flooding among other factors? What historical and contemporary urban planning decisions have already impacted marginalized communities? The episode will touch on these key questions and highlight the Urban Systems Lab’s approach to integrating cutting edge modeling, data visualization, and simulation to improve decision-making from local neighborhood to city, regional, and global scales.
Join us for this live recording of Person Place Thing with Randy Cohen featuring Dr. McPhearson.
Presented by the Urban Systems Lab at the Schools of Public Engagement and Person Place Thing with Randy Cohen.
Person Place Thing is produced with the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan and sponsored by WAMC Northeast Public Radio. An interview show, it is based on this idea: people are particularly engaging when they speak, not directly about themselves, but about something they care about. Guests talk about one person, one place, and one thing that are important to them. The result? Surprising stories from great talkers.
Timon McPhearson is Director of the Urban Systems Lab and Associate Professor of Urban Ecology at The New School. In 2017 he was awarded The New School's Distinguished University Teaching Award and in 2018 became a member of the IPCC and lead author for the urban adaptation chapter. He investigates the ecology in, of, and for cities and teaches urban resilience, systems thinking, and urban ecology. His work is published in scientific journals (e.g. Nature, Nature Climate Change, BioScience, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution), in books (Urban Planet, Sustainability in America’s Cities, Urban Sustainability Transitions), popular press (e.g. The Nature of Cities), and covered by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and more. He is a senior research fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, and associate research fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm University in Sweden.
Randy Cohen’s first professional work was writing humor pieces, essays, and stories for newspapers and magazines (The New Yorker, Harpers, the Atlantic, Young Love Comics). His first television work was writing for Late Night With David Letterman, for which he won three Emmy awards. His fourth Emmy was for his work on Michael Moore’s TV Nation. He received a fifth Emmy as a result of a clerical error, and he kept it. For twelve years he wrote “The Ethicist”; a weekly column for the New York Times Magazine. In 2010, his first play, The Punishing Blow, ran at New York’s Clurman Theater. His most recent book, Be Good: how to navigate the ethics of everything, was published by Chronicle. He is currently the creator and host of Person Place Thing, a public radio program.
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